RECIPE DOCTOR.

Cinnamon snickerdoodles lighten up their act

Q. These wonderful cinnamon-sugar cookies became very popular with my friends at church. The crispy edges and chewy center go over big.

Can you lighten them up without anyone noticing?

A. Keep them crowd-pleasers but lose some of the fat and calories: too tall an order for a snickerdoodle? The handful of people who sampled the lighter batch I made say "No!" These stayed moist for days, but I highly recommend you try them fresh from the oven.

The original recipe calls for a stick of butter and 1/2 cup of shortening. I kept the butter and omitted the shortening, as you might expect. But I wanted to come up with a way to keep these cookies moist, so I added some light corn syrup in place of half of the shortening.

Light cream cheese made up the rest of the difference to give the mixture a more butterlike texture.

The dough was a bit softer than I suspect the original dough was, but I chilled the dough for a couple of hours and that seemed to do the trick.

I then reduced the sugar to compensate for the light corn syrup. I cut down the eggs from two to one and added two egg whites. I also used double-strength vanilla extract to make sure the vanilla flavor came through.

I also prefer my snickerdoodles with an abundance of cinnamon-sugar coating, so I increased the cinnamon sugar by a tablespoon just to make sure I would have enough.

Light snickerdoodles

Preparation time: 25 minutes

Chilling time: 2 hours

Cooking time: 8 minutes per batch

Yield: 3 dozen cookies

1 stick (1/2 cup) butter

1/4 cup each: light corn syrup, light cream cheese (in block)

1 1/4 cups sugar

1 egg

2 egg whites

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 3/4 cups flour

2 teaspoons cream of tartar

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

Topping:

3 tablespoons sugar

3 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1. Heat oven to 400 degrees. Cream together butter, corn syrup, cream cheese and sugar in mixer bowl on medium speed. Add the egg, egg whites and the vanilla; beat until blended. Add the flour, cream of tartar, soda and salt. Beat on low speed to form a dough. Refrigerate for 2 hours or until firm enough to handle.

2. For topping, mix sugar and cinnamon in small, shallow bowl. Use a cookie scoop (1/8 level cup or heaping tablespoon) to form cookie balls; roll each generously in the cinnamon-sugar mixture. Place on lightly sprayed cookie sheet, 2 inches apart. Bake about 8 minutes or until set, but not too hard. Remove immediately from cookie sheet.